César Aira: Avant-Garde or Experimental Realism?

Abstract

This article will focus on one of the central issues in César Aira's narrative project: is it possible to achieve a unique return to what he himself calls, following Peter Bürger, "historical avant-gardes"? I argue that Aira's fiction should not be unquestionably inserted into the historical avant-garde movement that the author himself aspires to belong to, but rather belongs to the fruitful realm of South American experimental realist novels. Aira does indeed carry out an avant-garde project, but not for the reasons he claims, which are primarily based on an Adornian-Bürgersian reading of the avant-gardes. Instead, it aligns more with the "return of the real" as discussed by Hal Foster in "The Return of the Real" (1996). Aira is avant-garde because the project of the avant-gardes is not closed (as Bürger suggests), because his work continues to open new spaces for writing where there were none, because the affirming power of delirium is always of a social nature.